Courtesy photo
Pinkie’s Corner today, located on Highway 6, west of Imperial. The high wind charger he invented and built to produce electricity can be seen on the left of center in front of his workshop. The windmill is toward the back of the photo by the house.
Courtesy photo
Pinkie Hedges is shown with the garden tractor he built in 1937 from bed frames and car parts.
Pinkie’s Corner provides look into past, owner’s do-it-yourself talents
There are seven properties in Chase County listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.
Pinkie’s Corner is located at the junction of Highway 6 and 323rd Avenue, halfway between Imperial and Lamar.
It was listed on the National Registry of Historic Places in 2011, according to the registry site information.
“It is an example of an early rural auto roadside business,” the registry read.
Pinkie’s Corner, as it was so coined, was the home place and the 1920s-30s business site of handyman and inventor C. Roy Elvis “Pinkie” Hedges.
Pinkie’s Corner is an acre of land where his family of five sons and four daughters lived during the Great Depression.
Hedges was a DELCO serviceman and was known locally as a “Supreme Do-It-Yourselfer,” which included generating his own electricity for 20 years before rural electrification became available.
His knowledge of electricity was particularly important to the surrounding community during the period leading up to rural electrification.
Hedges invented, built and repaired everything in his workshop which he also built himself and roofed by making his own shingles out of gallon oil tin cans.
The registry chose to list Pinkie’s Corner because of three areas of interest.
He built two towers from old truck and car frames, making the steps of the ladders out of piston rods, said his son Dick Hedges of Commerce City, Colorado.
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